[RELEASE]Portal: The Flash Version mappack

[appunxintator]

I just finished this and I must say, this is not a map pack at all. This is an entire re-imagining of the Portal storyline.

This is one of the only maps that actually gave me trouble at a few parts. I'm not talking about the 'I want to smash my computer' trouble, I'm talking about the kind that keeps you thinking for a few minutes then you feel smart.

Of course, nothing is perfect. In the chamber that rellikpd showed the picture of, the area with the ball launcher is too dark, so I didn't see it at first.

Also, when you get the cake, maybe you should have put some hints as to where you have to go, because I had to noclip to find it.

Anyways, great job. This must have taken an extremely long time to make.

[Cyclone]

Well, I just finished the map pack, and, before I get to the individual components of it all, let me say that as a whole, I admire this map pack simply for the effort that went into it. The beginning was great. The ending was superb. The middle... well, it was kind of a mixed bag. For one, things got repetitive very quickly in the third and fourth maps. Pretty much every puzzle had you shooting through holes and dodging turrets to get to cubes. And at first, its great - that's what Portal is all about.

However, having us do it three or four times in a row with very little break can get tiring. Plus, the layouts of some of the later puzzles were so confusing that I spent five minutes just figuring out what I needed to do, and five more actually doing it without getting killed by a turret ambush, ceiling crusher, lightning corridor, energy ball ambush, or something else.

And then there were the parts that, in my opinion, were simply a lack of effort. For example, in the part where you crawl through the cube tube, the tube is simply surrounded by a dark void. Seriously, would it have killed you to put a texture there? And on the ride of death with the WCC you put invisible walls preventing us from reaching the turrets. My first instinct was to jump into the ledges where the turrets were, using the WCC as a shield, knock out the turret, and hop back on. But no, instead, you have us fall to our deaths for no good reason. Come on, you designed an entire game mechanic (the fizzy blue fields) that did effectively the same thing, only without the humiliating and quite frankly stupid death by invisible barrier. Finally, the portal-friendliness of surfaces. Something would be totally resistant to portals, then something would happen, and suddenly we can put a portal on it? You could at least give us some indication that it's changing, rather than making us try everything every time something changes. The elevator ride after the cake was the worst part of the map pack. You don't let us shoot, even though we logically should be able to, and when we can, one of the surfaces we need to put a portal on doesn't become portal friendly until the very last possible second - again with no indication of when, how, or why.

I could go on, but instead, I'll focus on the positive. The plot was awesome, the ending was great, and the final boss battle was superbly done. Some of the "shock moments", such as the mounted portal surface breaking off and coming crashing down were pure adrenaline. The music was well used, as were GLaDOS quotes. I also like the "epic moments" you included. Seeing the Borealis and the Chell clones just gave me this awesome feeling, like I was playing this part in something really big, witnessing, and even causing, some seriously influential events. Truly, epic. Oh, and to reiterate, the ending rocked.

Overall, like I said, for the amount of time and effort you put in to this, only the highest accolade can be given. But know that there is a great deal of work to be done - a little polish for some of the map packs rougher edges, and major overhauls to the parts of the game that made it hard just to get the vaguest clue what I was supposed to be doing, as well as those that almost literally gave me deja vu (go through this maze of portal holes, find the cubes, put them on the buttons... for the next hour). I look forward to any future work you produce - it's sure to be even better.

[rellikpd]

Cyclone its "spoiler" not "spoilers" just fyi...

[Ricotez]

Yeah, that was what I liked most about this map pack. Certain parts were annoying, but the rest was so much fun I soon forget about the annoying parts.

[Browen]

[Hober]

Re: the Borealis

When I was poking around the folders installing it, I'm pretty sure I saw a model for that included in the rar. There's no precedent for such things, but it seems it would likely be reasonably considered fair use.

[Hen7]

EP2 and EP1 are not required only HL2 and Portal, everything else is already included in the pack.
Cyclone, yeah I know there are some problems here and there, but when you have a 40+ levels map, expects some glitches, my beta testers never told me about stuff like the stuff you mentioned.
But anyway, I'm planning on making the mappack as a MOD, with a V2 of the maps, fixing by everything that the community said about it + advance hard versions of the maps.

[Kiavik]

[rellikpd]

that sir, would be pure asskickery.

btw: welcome to the Spotlight

[portal_party]

This "map" - more like a complete product - is unreal. I swear this was done by the makers of portal as a fun side project of sorts, I find it hard to believe it was done by one person. Valve needs to hire this guy.

Yeah, there's some rough spots, but overall if someone told me this was a beta for Portal 2 as a storyline of another person in the complex (or another clone of Chell), I could have believed it.

The cake room: putting a fizzler up top on the descent and a couple of rocket turrets (instead of the fans) in front of a mesh but behind a large vertical door that opens when you hit bottom would eliminate the need to disable the gun, but still prevent portal placement until the last second when the pedestal stops. I jumped to the sides a few times before realizing what to do, and the disabling gun was a bit annoying. Though not being able to shoot a portal on a moving platform is consistent with the official usage.

The end battle was great, but I like others just hid behind a truck on the second floor while it killed itself. Tried opening portals above it and dropping boxes on it but that didn't seem to do much.

[FISHY CRACKERS]

I've only been playing for about an hour, i stopped to get some sleep on the level with the companion cube (yay!) but so far i found only one problem. In a previous chamber in which two buttons are under a red barrier, so you can only throw cubes down onto them, when the cube dispenser breaks and you go up to unjam it, i was jumping around in that tube for quite a few minutes before it finally all fell out, and for a while i felt like i was trapped and i was trying to pull the cubes up out of the way, which of course didn't work since i was standing on them.

[rellikpd]

[appunxintator]

[elt]

I hate to have to ask for this, but... walkthrough plz!

I feel like an idiot trying to play through these downloaded maps the rest of you seem to have no problems solving. Having to resort to noclip just to see what the next room looks like is more than a bit lame. Seriously, how DO you guys do it? Is there some magic button that slows things into 'bullet-time' to allow for amazing feats of mid-fling portal-shooting while flying upside-down and sideways at the same time the camera is trying to auto-right itself? Because if that's what solving these puzzles takes, I'm truly in awe of your collective 'mad skillz'.

All that being said, this truly is an excellent (series of) maps. I just wish they didn't make me feel like such an idiot.

[Fusion]

This is brilliant. I think there has been enough positive and negative things said about this map so I'm going to ask a technical question:

How did you make the Mechbot. It appears to have AI and it can move around independently so I don't know how you would have done this without actually making a mod and programming it as an entity. If this is just one extremely complex Hammer prefab then its amazing what you managed to do without coding.

Also just a small thing, you should have made the sinks in a modelling program. It is harder than just making it Hammer but it's not extremely hard and it would look so much better. And (I'm being picky here) I found that there were a lot of lights in the map that had no fittings, there was no reason why a certain area should be lit because there was nothing casting light in it. I guess after making such a massive map pack it would be really annoying to have to put all light fittings everywhere though.

This was a mammoth effort though and you've definitely created an experience not just a map so, congratulations!